Theatre Producer and Broadway Impresario
Tuesday, April 17, 2007, 11:10 a.m.
Ted Chapin is president and executive director of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization. Founded more than a half a century ago by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, R & H represents a wide variety of entertainment copyrights. Through its theatrical, concert, and music publishing divisions, R & H represents not only the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein, but also Irving Berlin and works by Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, Kurt Weill, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Adam Guettel, Sheldon Harnick, Dory Previn, W. Somerset Maugham and others. Among its recent Broadway productions is The Light in the Piazza, which earned six Tony Awards in 2005, including Best Original Score.
A Lawrence theatre student in the late sixties, Ted Chapin has steered R & H to three Tony and two Drama Desk Award nominations for Best Musical Revival during his 25 years at the helm of the organization, for productions of Carousel (1994 Tony winner), The King and I (1996 Tony and DDA winner), and the Sound of Music (1998).
Prior to joining R & H in 1981, Chapin amassed more than five years of stage credits as the production or directorial assistant for Follies, The Rothchilds, and The Unknown Soldier and His Wife in New York, as well as productions of Leonard Bernstein's Mass at the Kennedy Center and Candide at the Los Angeles and San Francisco Civic Light Operas. His early career included serving as musical director for the National Theatre of the Deaf's production of Four Saints in Three Acts, associate director of the National Theater Institute, and producer of the Musical Theatre Lab at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
In 2003, he turned his observations as the production assistant on Sondheim's Follies into a book, Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical "Follies," which was published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Chapin serves on the Board of the American Theatre Wing, and has been chairman of the Advisory Committee for New York City Center's Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert series since its inception. He served as a Tony Awards nominator for two seasons, and is currently a member of the Tony Administration Committee. He has been a visiting lecturer for the Cameron Mackintosh Chair in Contemporary Theatre at St. Catherine's College, Oxford University; a panelist for the opera/musical theatre program of the National Endowment for the Arts; and a producer and lecturer for four concerts of the Doubleday series at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution.
Read the Press Release: A Life in Musical Theatre Explored in Lawrence University Convocation
